THE LAST HARVEST

pute in a vestry at Providence between two hot
church-members. One said at last, " I should
like to know who you are " —

" Who I am ? " cried the other, — " who I am!
I am a humble Christian, you damned old heathen,
you!"

The minister whom he heard say that "nobody
enjoyed religion less than ministers, as none en-
joyed food so little as cooks," must have provoked
the broadest kind of a smile.

Although one of Emerson's central themes in
his Journals was his thought about God, or his
feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded in for-
mulating his ideas on the subject and could not
say what God is or is not. At the age of twenty-
one he wrote in his Journal, " I know that I know
next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very
promising frame of mind for a young man. '* It is
not certain that God exists, but that He does not
is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera."

A little later he wrote: " The government of
God is not a plan — that would be Destiny, [or
we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore."

He quotes this from Hotmus: "Of the Unity of
God, nothing can be predicated, neither being, nor
essence, nor life, for it is above all these."

It was a bold saying of his that " God builds
his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and
religion."

48ory as this